Handling connected domains with the “right tool for the job”

Document databases (like other aggregate-oriented databases ) do a good job at storing a single representation of an aggregate entity but struggle to handle use-cases that require multiple, different views of the domain. Handling connections between documents tends to be an afterthought that isn’t covered well by the aggregate data model.

Real world use-cases

Sarah described how she worked on a TV show application at Pivotal and discussed the modeling and data management implications that surfaced when the application’s use-case evolved.

The same applied when working on the Diaspora project which started out as a Ruby on Rails application using MongoDB.

For both projects, these requirements caused difficulties with the chosen data model and database which triggered the move to PostgreSQL. A relational database was chosen as it allowed some of the fidelity in the model to return.

Unfortunately this comes at the cost of dealing with queries with a high number of JOINS which can cause performance issues.

Live Graph data models of Diaspora and the TV-Show

To show how a graph database would handle these use-cases we created two live graph data-models of both the a social network like Diaspora and the TV-Show . For that we set up a small example data set and then represent the use-cases she mentioned as a set of graph search queries with the graph query language Cypher . These GraphGists allow easy modeling discussions and a live exploration of the dataset and use-cases and provide a good starting point for your own (forked) variant of the domain model.

Example graph model – TV Shows

To quickly develop the models we use the typical patterns that we’re looking for in a graph when answering the use-cases described. We call it whiteboard-friendlyness

Shows, seasons and episodes

(:TVShow)-[:HAS_SEASON]->(:Season)-[:HAS_EPISODE]->(:Episode)

Characters played by actors featured in a episode

(:Episode) -[:FEATURED_CHARACTER]->(:Character),

(:Character)<-[:PLAYED_CHARACTER ]- (:Actor)

Users writing reviews for individual episodes

(:User)-[:WROTE_REVIEW]->(:Review)<-[:HAS_REVIEW]-(:Episode)

Using these basic patterns we can quickly create sample data for the domain and also develop the queries used to solve the use-cases. For example:

Listing all the episodes (filmography) of an actor across episodes and shows

Graph Databases as a niche technology?

As you can see, it is incredibly easy to model these use-cases with a graph database. So why weren’t they considered? To quote from the article:

But what are the alternatives? Some folks say graph databases are more natural, but I’m not going to cover those here, since graph databases are too niche to be put into production.

This is an interesting observation, as Neo4j is the most widely used graph database and has been running in production setups for more than 10 years now. Neo Technology has more than 100 paying customers (30 of which are Global 2000 companies) and there are tens of thousands of community users that deployed Neo4j as a database backing production applications. The industries of these use-cases span everything from network management, gaming, social, finance, job search to logistics and dating sites.

Judge for yourself

If you work in a domain with richly connected data, we encourage you to try to model it as a graph and manage it with a graph database. For some more insights of how this works feel free to check out the freely available book “ Graph Databases ” by O’Reilly.

Also, the offer to support Diaspora still stands! We’re happy to help so please reach out to us if you’re interested. You can also follow the discussion with Sarah on Twitter. Feel free to jump in!

5 Comments

Bullshit gold.<br /><br />Joins or subqueries can be optimized into one another and vice-versa depending on the specific characteristics (SQL Server for example requires you to write only subqueries and auto-optimizes into joins where applicable – supposedly).<br /><br />&quot;Graph&quot; databases are just a simplified case of SQL (arguably, the most useful one) and are subject to the exact same

Ludovic: what you say may be true of some graph databases–like FlockDB which is just a thin layer atop MySQL– but it&#39;s not true of Neo4j.<br /><br />Here&#39;s the tech secret (not magic, even if it can sometimes feel that way to users): records are stored on disk &amp; in memory in fixed-length buffers, and point to each other using (offset) pointers. This technique, which amounts to

Philip Rathle: You can&#39;t set pointers at write time that will also be correct when loading in-memory, unless of course you load the whole block as once, which doesn&#39;t make much sense.<br /><br />According to you, the particularity with Neo4j is that it stores the relations with the item, which is basically just another way to model your data, that does provide faster access to relations.<

Ludovic: There are no statements mentioned here that claim that Neo4j is &quot;better&quot; than PostgreSQL in general sense. The article simply articulates that Graph Databases allow you to do fairly complex things very simply.<br /><br />Take a look at https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/graphgist/wiki<br /><br />You&#39;ll find a set of interactive tutorials that show you the benefit of using

I would like to learn this stuff for handling recruitment data .. looks good seems intuitive one problem i have is building the web interface not got much experience of that .. also best way to model the data….